What to Know
Years before Josh Duggar began serving time in federal prison, he was wrapped up in a totally different scandal. After he was busted for using the cheating website, Ashley Madison, during the site’s data breach in August 2015, his infidelity was exposed to the world, leaving wife Anna Duggar to react to it all on the family’s reality show, Counting On. Now, a clip of Anna speaking about the scandal has resurfaced, and it’s even more difficult to watch now than it was back then, knowing exactly how things would play out for her in the years to come.
Josh owned up to his infidelity when it was made public.
Hackers released the names of Ashley Madison’s 32 million users, and among those names were several public figures, Josh included. The scandal unfolded just months after Josh had been exposed for molesting girls, including some of his sisters, years earlier.
“I have been the biggest hypocrite ever. While espousing faith and family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the internet and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife,” he said in a statement at the time, via CNN. “I brought hurt and a reproach to my family, close friends and the fans of our show with my actions that happened when I was 14-15 years old, and now I have re-broken their trust.”
At the time, Josh entered a rehab program while Anna and their children stayed behind.
There seemed to be no question in Anna’s mind: She was staying with him.
Anna Rambles About Josh’s 2015 Cheating
by u/INCoctopus in DuggarsSnark
Considering the Duggars’ ultra-conservative beliefs, it wasn’t too surprising to find out that Anna had no plans to leave Josh, even after the entire world found out that he had cheated on her, and she attempted to share her reasoning while talking to producers on an episode of Counting On. A clip from that episode has resurfaced on Reddit this week, and knowing what we know now — that Josh would end up in prison years later — it’s even harder to watch than it was the first time around.
Though Anna does acknowledge that it was a “betrayal,” it seems like she believed the situation would only get worse, not better, if she chose to leave Josh instead of staying with him… yikes.
“I knew if I went off of what I was feeling, I would turn a mess into a disaster,” she said in the clip. “In the stun and in the shock of everything, I was just praying, ‘God, help me to respond to all of this.’ I didn’t know what to do. I knew we needed help, and I was just praying God would give the wisdom and the help that we needed to take the next step.”
It’s hard to see how truly devastated Anna is in this clip.
Watching Anna’s facial expressions in the video, it’s almost like she’s totally dissociating… and that detail wasn’t lost on the critics who are now rehashing the clip on Reddit. It’s hard not to feel for her here, and it’s incredibly sad to think of what she must have been going through at the time.
“Wow. You can see her pushing her feelings down in real time during this clip,” one person wrote, while another added, “I feel bad that the show made her talk about this for entertainment/monetary purposes. She probably had no choice.”
If Anna has any regrets about staying with Josh, she’s not sharing those publicly. But how different would her life be right now if she had chosen to walk away a decade ago?
READ NEXT: Leaked Emails Show Anna Duggar Called Josh’s CSAM Conviction ‘Victimless’ & People Are Done With Her
